America’s recent foreign policy failures, notably though not exclusively the inability to win in either Afghanistan or Iraq, have precipitated a good deal of soul-searching about grand strategy, the role of military versus civilian power, and internationalism versus national self-interest.

Under the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, there are 11.5 million able-bodied adults who are enrolled in Medicaid, more than double what was originally projected, according to a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability.

In 1855, a new poet introduced himself to the world: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos / Disorderly, fleshly, sensual…eating drinking and breeding.” Experimental in its use of free verse; progressive in its treatment of race, gender, and sexuality; and above all democratic in its politics and its spirituality, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stoked a vast fire that swept through world poetry, consuming and altering all the landscape before it.

One-hundred sixty years later, we have confirmation that Whitman’s poetic wildfire is finally under control. Sharon Olds’s new volume Odes is the firebreak we’ve been waiting for, the clearing across which we can safely watch Whitman’s flames dim to embers.

The first pleasure of Elizabeth Bowen’s collected reviews and literary essays is that the late Irish novelist never wastes our time with a childhood memory or the events of a recent vacation recounted with affected casualness.

The neocons did not come empty-handed. Long before fervid anti-Bush agitators in the 2000s warped the word “neoconservative” to mean something like “Jewish war-monger,” the first generation of new conservatives had made its 1970s move from anti-communist Democrats to Reagan-supporting Republicans.

I came to love The Beach Boys as a typical ’90s child, watching The Muppets’ “Kokomo” endlessly on Nickelodeon, fascinated by the twitching hula girls’ vacant eyes and Kermit’s spastic ukulele strumming, smooth steelpan sounds rippling across the melody’s placid surface. I guess I thought that bunny with the sunglasses was pretty cool. According to Muppet Wiki, his name is Be-Bop and he also scats.

I admit my artistic sensibility was embarrassingly underdeveloped at age six. I adored Ace of Base’s “I Saw the Sign,” with its moody black-and-white video, the animated flames and floating ankhs (ankhs were pretty cool in the 90s. I can’t explain why.).